What is dynamic content and how can you use it to meet your objectives?
Any marketer will tell you that email marketing can be an excellent way of generating interest and revenue. In fact, almost three quarters of marketers (73%) think email marketing offers an ‘excellent’ to ‘good’ return on investment (Source: Email Marketing Industry Census 2016).
But how can you ensure your email messages really stand out from the crowd and go that little bit further to help your organisation meet its marketing and revenue objectives?
Dynamic content…the future of email marketing?
So what exactly is dynamic content? In short, it is any type of content that adjusts automatically so it can add immediate impact and help to make your messages more interesting and memorable. Not only does it make it easier for your brand to stand out in the inbox, but it’s a great step towards one-to-one communication.
If you ignore the…
Find out why email should be a big focus for you post-Brexit and get some tips on campaigns to implement
I was in the South of France when the referendum result happened. The enormity of it hit me quite hard while surrounded by such kind and engaging people, all trying to be sympathetic about the decision. Since that day, focus (at least in business terms) has turned to the impact it will have on companies. As an organisation that works with both Global and UK based companies, we have seen many different reactions to the vote, but the overriding emotion seems to be caution. Some companies are already in recession planning mode (just in case), others are holding off on non-essential projects and most are not comfortable making any big and expensive decisions right now.
One thing we are seeing and hearing consistently is…
How to engage your audience by optimising every feature of your email
Every email that you send to your clients has distinct elements. There’s the subject line, of course, as well as headline and body, to name just a few. And every single one of those elements has a distinct role to play in emails that are either engaging and often read versus those that quickly land in the “trash” folder.
Take the body of an email: If your customers feel like they’re reading a generic piece of information that’s crafted for everyone, and not specifically for them, they’ll be turned off. That points to the importance of data gathering as a part of the email-crafting process. The more you know about customers beyond that email address—who they are, how old they are, what they like and don’t like—the more likely you can create sub-groups of emails that offer benefits and reasoning…
By
August 16, 2016
5 tactics for more engaging email in 2016
Email is the most misunderstood tactic in marketing. We’ve all heard the oft-referenced statistic that email’s ROI can be as much as $130 per dollar spent. That idea gave rise to the perception that email is a cheap, easy way to generate high returns. And that’s why so many brands treat email as a money button: Press send, get cash.
Of course, that attitude doesn’t leave much room for creativity. Email does present enormous earning potential, but that potential often remains untapped because so many marketers are stuck in 1999. They see email as merely a workhorse moneymaker instead of a source of inspiration and brand engagement.
Email strategies can do more than serve marketers. When done well, they can also serve their recipients. For example, after I bought a Karma Go, I started using the hotspot device like crazy. After a number of…
Simple messaging, clean design and the use of white space to steer the eye are key to effective email designs.
While many companies do email marketing effectively, the ones that don’t often are slow to learn from their mistakes. Companies will spend big marketing budgets only to be disappointed with their results, and are often left unaware of what went wrong with the campaign. One key to getting your email marketing campaign right, is to have a full understanding of what exactly people find or do not find engaging with your emails.
Easy SMTP and EyeQuant teamed up together to evaluate a number of different email marketing campaigns using their heat map software. They used the results of their evaluations and created an infographic which you can see below.
The heat map analysis allowed them to understand how customers are engaging or not engaging with their emails. As you can see in the…
How to deliver successful email campaigns with little or no HTML knowledge
Email campaigns tend to be the bread and butter of what marketers do. They typically have high conversion rates compared to other marketing channels and are a quick and easy way to stay in touch with your contact lists. However, marketing staff are spending way too much time developing emails and not enough time focusing on activities that will give them a better ROI, such as future planning and developing successful data practices (according to the 2016 Email Industry Census).
How long does it typically take for your staff, or you, to build an email?
In Litmus’ ‘State of Email Production’ report the answers ranged from a few days to between one and two weeks, with 64% of participants being more likely to spend weeks rather than days. That’s a lot of time invested in something that will take…
Make sure you remember your target audience aren't always like you. Write emails for them, not you.
I collect first names on my newsletter sign-up form, but I never use them.
[Cue embarrassed silence and nervous shuffling among the experts out there.]
Yes, it’s an email marketing no-no. The extra form field hurts sign-up rates and it raises expectations that subsequent emails will be personalized more than they are. The survival of my “first name” field is partly down to the delusion that I’ll bite the personalization bullet “sometime soon”.
Call me a database coward. But it also survives because seeing those first names acts as a necessary reminder that my emails go to, um, human beings. As in many online industries, the idea that the audience actually includes sentient beings is often trampled into oblivion by our technology focus and the words that go with it:
Targets, segments, cells, addresses, clusters, groups, samples, lists, databases,…
Dan Grech interviews David Wood about his email marketing strategy
I’ve been here for about five years and had been doing email for about three years beforehand. I started off working in B2B, at an IT distributor, which was very different to what I do now. And back then I was much more hands-on; creating the emails, structuring, planning, copywriting, all of that stuff.
I wanted to get more immediate results, so I moved into the retail space. The opportunity came up for Email Marketing Manager at Direct Wines, which covered off working with Laithwaite’s, Sunday Times, Averys, and others, so it was ideal really. Within my current role, I directly manage one, but indirectly manage a team of about eight. That includes writers, creatives, HTML, so it kind of covers quite a range.
…
Write better copy to get better results
I once had a tarantula walk over my hand. The experience comes to mind every time I face a blank piece of paper. A rising sense of panic…paralysis…a prickle of sweat. Sound familiar? So I thought I’d share the practical tricks I use to write email marketing copy. Not so much the intricacies of word choice or paragraph structure, but the process of actually getting the job done and done well. Your tips are also welcome!
1. Define the recipient
The writing process needs a framework to proceed in: a real or implicit briefing…the whos, whats and whys of the task. Who will get this email and in what context? Have they undertaken some specific action (like registered for an event)? When will they get the email?
How does this email fit, conceptually and in terms of timing, with other emails or related marketing campaigns…
By
June 20, 2016
How to best use punctuation in email marketing campaigns
Is the smartphone really killing off the period as a punctuation mark for texters? A recent story in the Washington Post says it is.
Where the full stop once marked the end of a sentence, the simple line break now claims that role in texting. The stop itself has evolved into a shorthand symbol that charges an otherwise innocuous sentence with deeper meaning, such as anger. It's less obvious than emoji and takes fewer taps on the keyboard.
That made us think (because we think about email all the time) about subject lines with stops at the end. Do they help or hurt opens, clicks and deliverability? And what about other punctuation marks? Do question marks really drive more traffic? And what’s the deal with exclamation marks?
To get some definitive answers, we turned to Touchstone's universe of virtual subscribers to see what impact punctuation…
